 | Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years. Thanks, CNET Support |
Windows Vista? Home Premium: Neo Empriva 540NVPi
Intel
Discussion is locked
The Intel GMA 950 is indeed capable of handling Aero automatically, and reasonably well at that. Just note that laptops are generally not designed for graphics, and that your overall Windows Experience Index will likely be a 2.0 (or there abouts) due to the fact you'd be using integrated graphics. That is usually the unfortunate trade-off when purchasing a laptop over a desktop.
John
A lot of manufacturers are loading a lot of unnecessary applications into the startup configurations. This unnecessarily loads the RAM with applications you are not using, with the result that boot times are increased and the machine is slowed down. This leads some people with 1 GB Vista machines to conclude that they either have a defective machine or have insufficient RAM.
If you feel the perfomance is unsatisfactory, click on the system configuration item in the start menu, click selective startup on the General tab, then deselect non-system and non-security items on the Startup tab. Then click OK, reboot, and enjoy. With the Toshiba package, this decreased the RAM load by about 400 MB, the difference between misery and joy on a 1 GB machine. Current RAM load as I write this is about 750 MB. Your machine will have about the same capabilities as an XP machine with 512 MB RAM.
The deselected applications will still be available when you need them. If there's something that you really miss, you can always add it back.
Windows has dozens of individual services, nearly half of which may run automatically when you boot your computer, depending on the configuration. This is done for your convenience, with Microsoft enabling what they think the average person will need. However, many of them can be disabled based on your usage. The indexing service, for instance, is unnecessary if you don't use the Search function very often. Disabling unnecessary services can give you an instant performance boost, just like Igiveup2's suggestion of disabling unnecessary startup programs.
John
Chowhound
Comic Vine
GameFAQs
GameSpot
Giant Bomb
TechRepublic